Collaboration - Journal of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Summer 1995, Vol. 21, No. 1


APROPOS

Once, the mountains held within their silver walls a forest so high and so gracefully forgotten that it rode above the troubles of the world as easily as the blinding white clouds that sometimes catch on jagged peaks and musically unfurl. Cold lakes scattered in the greenery ran so deep that soundings were of no avail, and the meadows along the tree line, suspended in the light, were as smooth and green as slabs of jade. . . . And though empires and kingdoms below might nervously claim it, the forest was in its own way inviolablea domain of hearth smoke in unwavering columns against a flawless blue sky, of mountains clad in wind-buffed ice, of the thinnest air, of rivers running white and bursting with oxygen.

Perhaps you have felt the presence of such places when, in a darkened concert hall, the music makes the moon rise, perfectly fresh and bright, as if the roof has opened up above you, or when the trees shudder in a sudden wind and the sun unexpectedly lights the undersides of their rustling leaves. They do exist, although they are so hard to find that it is tempting to believe they are illusions.--Mark Helprin, Swan Lake

Let me take the whole universe and put it on the tips of your eyelashes.--Yun-Men (?- 1949)

An appreciation of the 1960s would be better served by allowing that decade's lessons to be enacted, not simply packaged and sold back to us as a sitcom. Those lessons are simple and important: the belief that we are not simply individuals but part of a larger culture that requires our most earnest efforts and ideas; the conviction that the worlds within and outside ourselves are subject to transfor mation, that our actions can shape the future; that what we choose to do matters deeply; the insis tence that America has a place for our best selves, and to the degree that it doesn't, it must be changed; the notion that music can help formulate a vision toward which we can aspire.--Anthony DeCurtis

When I say that at the conclusion of this transformation, if we survive, we will be unimaginably differentplease don't mistake that for new age goo. The pious platitudes of the new agers are pathetic incantations hoping to tame the untamable. Our transformation will leave humankind different, not necessarily better. It's just that all of us collectively have decided that it's time for the big changethough individually most of us wish it were happening to somebody else in some other space-time.--Michael Ventura

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.--Anais Nin, 1903 - 1977

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.--Ogden Nash, 1902 - 1971

There's one question scientists are mostly scared to discuss. What is the nature of self awareness? Dare we utter the C-wordconsciousness? What is the nature of consciousness? What kind of threshold of complexity is there for consciousness? What does consciousness mean? Well, you're not thought to be very scientific if you use words like that. Even the word "mind," the M-word, is one that can get a scientist into trouble.--Murry Gell-Man

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspa pers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.--Joseph Campbell, 1904 - 1987

No words, acts.--The Mother